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Observatory, founded 2025

NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory

The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile began its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time in mid-2026, filming the southern sky every few nights.

Location
El Peñón peak, Cerro Pachón, Coquimbo Region
Focus
Dark energy, Dark matter, Solar System, Stars, Galaxies, Telescopes and missions
Coordinates
-30.245, -70.749
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Location of NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory on a globe

The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, on Cerro Pachón in Chile, exists to make a time-lapse movie of the whole southern sky. Its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) began in mid-2026 (announced on June 30, 2026). Each patch of sky will be observed about 800 times over the decade, revealing anything that moves, flares or fades. Rubin is a joint project of the US National Science Foundation and Department of Energy, operated by NSF NOIRLab and SLAC.

Flagship instruments

  • Simonyi Survey Telescope: an 8.4-meter telescope that takes a new image roughly every 40 seconds.
  • LSST Camera: 3,200 megapixels, the largest digital camera ever built, assembled at SLAC with KIPAC scientists leading construction.
  • Alert system: up to about 7 million alerts per night from about 10 terabytes of data.

Recent results

The survey’s design is set out in the 2019 LSST reference paper. First-look images came on June 23, 2025, and Data Preview 1, built from 1,792 commissioning exposures, followed a week later. During about a month and a half of early optimization surveys, Rubin found more than 11,000 previously unknown asteroids, including 33 near-Earth objects and 380 trans-Neptunian objects (details). First alerts went out in February 2026, and Rubin data helped catch a supernova at the moment of shock breakout. Early Data Preview 2 was released on July 27, 2026.

What to watch, 2026-2030

  • October to December 2026: Data Preview 2 completed (visit-level images and template coadds).
  • October to December 2026: nightly public release of prompt images and catalogs, after an 80-hour embargo, expected to begin.
  • Later: Data Release 1, from the first year of LSST observations (no fixed date yet).

Why scientists are converging here

No other telescope revisits the whole southern sky this often, this deep. That makes Rubin central to dark energy measurements through weak lensing, to the Solar System census, and to every field that studies things that change. Its partners in the dark-energy race are Euclid and the Roman Space Telescope.

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